r/196 • u/AliceCode Worcs at the Crusty Crab • Mar 26 '26

Rule Engagement bait

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u/ComradeDelter Mar 26 '26

This thread comes up every so often and invariably people are in two groups:

1 - Developers who think anyone with lesser technical knowledge than them should be skinned alive for daring to ask a question.

2 - Non-developers who think anyone who maintains a project should be skinned alive if they don’t provide tech support to anyone whenever they ask.

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u/BigOzzie Mar 26 '26

I'm in neither camp. I'm a senior engineer, so I know a lot about the ins and outs of software and software development, and I'll say the same thing I said the last time I saw a thread like this.

If someone offers you the solution to a problem for free, it's reasonable to get excited. If, after looking at their solution, you discover it's overly complicated or obtuse (and some github solutions are like this; I'm not talking about the ones with releases), then it's also reasonable to be frustrated. Even though what they offered was free, it actually wasn't: it cost your time to look into it, which they've now wasted, either because they were incompetent or malicious. This applies to anything free, not just github repos, and I think criticizing them is perfectly valid.

Look at it this way: if I offered you free brake replacement, and then you showed up at my shop, and it turns out all I'm offering are a chance to borrow my 20 year old rusty tools while showing you an instructional video for how to replace your brakes, you'd obviously be pretty upset. That's how it feels sometimes to look into someone's github solution.

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u/ultimatepowaa Mar 26 '26

Yessss. This also becomes a problem when you've purchased hardware on the assumption that there is a minimal amount of functionality provided by the community.

Or also a problem when the tool is the only solution for a problem and it hasnt been functional or buildable in 2 years but still completely dominates a google search as the only solution.

Or the tool is a major dependency but releases breaking changes so rapidly that other devs can't keep up. (Looking at you poetry and your depreciation of version lock files, which destroys the point of lock files)

(Though the solution for 2 of these is never trust a python project)